


Starlight

by Lord_Twinkle



Category: Good Omens - Neil Gaiman & Terry Pratchett
Genre: Aziraphale and Crowley in Love (Good Omens), Brief mention of self-harm, Crowley Was Raphael Before Falling (Good Omens), M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-11-03
Updated: 2019-11-03
Packaged: 2021-01-21 08:26:27
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,128
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21296474
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Lord_Twinkle/pseuds/Lord_Twinkle
Summary: A deaf dialogue between a disgraced angel and a creator who still has faith in them.
Relationships: Aziraphale & Crowley (Good Omens)
Comments: 3
Kudos: 55





	Starlight

**Author's Note:**

> English is not my first language. If you notice mistakes, please point them out.

Starlight.

There is a pit inside of you where the heat of a thousand suns should have filled you with their warmth. It expands like the slowly encroaching dust of the desert.

You are fading.

My dearest one, it was a state of life demanding for another way of living.

You are not lost to me yet. I see a life for you, away from Me. A life where you are free and where that void that hungers inside of you can be full again.

My Love was never what you needed.

And so, the Fall.

It is not for Me to understand the pain, but even after all this time, I can still hear the whisper of your searing fissures.

Heartbreak, it would appear, is much too similar to falling in love.

\- - -

What sort of God are you anyways? Who would be all knowing, and tell Her children love is not absolute?

My Fall; a hand grasping my neck, snapping me out of my unhindered mind, control wrapping itself like a vice around my chest - domination - my brutal defeat. Your rejection.

My life continuing, despite this fact, is an act of defiance. Spending my time on Earth, my choice.

Mortals are so new, but they have a wisdom of their own. I have learned one thing from them: one must grow to reject their mother's rage. But, Your anger is like the sun – constant – something we do not escape from. I have mistaken it too often for love.

Yes. My Mother's anger is like the sun, which is like love, which should be easy, when it is anything but.

Do you see how I persist in telling You about the sun when I want to tell You about the rain?

Here, among mortals, I should be making trouble, I should be tempting their souls into eternal damnation. But, truth is, they are better at it than I could ever be. They use violence like a ceremony to test the boundaries of Your so called love.

And all I can do is watch as they rage against the existence they were given.

I used to be a healer. I could have helped them.

I look at my hands now, and they are empty.

What is the opposite of one that heals?

Broken.

\- - -

The pull of gravity did always captivate you.

Bombs over London, rain during the Deluge, the guillotine, Empires crumbling.

All things gravity pulls to shatter. All the things that, like you, break – a porcelain cup on the floor.

Unforgivable.

All things that ultimately break your heart a little more.

You don't realize it, but the light deep in your bones will never leave you. That is yours to keep. It pulls you back to Me, to your silent worship – the work of the hands you feel are so empty.

\- - -

And I swear, the Fall is nothing compared to the emptiness. Like You've taken something out of me and I have to search this body of mine for scars I will never find. It's in these moments I know You have truly left me.

In the early days, the void You left threatens to swallow me whole. Now, I am learning to be free from You – I spend less and less time searching the fields of the night sky for answers.

Sometimes, I think I have finally understood freedom. But then, I see my Angel.

He gave his sword away, Your Guardian of the Eastern Gate. He just gave it up. Like it was the easiest thing. Not without fear, but with righteousness in his heart.

And I have to stop to think: freedom must start with impossibly blue eyes.

\- - -

You must know: holiness is not in the halo of your head, but in the crux of your hands - the actions we find the courage to take.

Aziraphale could never Fall. He has love in his heart and he knows nothing is beyond My forgiveness.

As for freedom, it is always relative – sometimes, it isn't freedom at all: when a prison is so wide that the bars make themselves faint in the distance, reaching out to the other side seems like the most impossible thing, then.

And yet, with time, you have offered all of yourself to him, genuinely. With fear. Always the fear – my rejection sinking its teeth deep into your flesh – a reminder making it harder and harder for you to keep your hands from crushing what you haven't lost yet. The embers of love rekindled between grasping fingers.

Your love has always been a delicate thing. Something fragile in your extended hands: not a temptation, not a gift, an offer. You hold it inside your palms like you did the newly formed hearts of stars; a bird's nest – always on the brink of collapse.

You had forgotten what it felt like, to love something so unconditionally. A state of vulnerability that terrifies you to no end.

I have seen you. In the dead of the night, dropping glasses just so you can numb the feeling. Splayed on a bed of shards on your kitchen floor, looking at slim rivers of scarlet making their way on the tiles. These rivers can never wash the landscape you live in – they are not water sustaining land. You know this. But you find comfort in the limitations of your body. And you drink yourself to oblivion just so you won't dream of him.

What are you afraid of Starlight?

Forgiveness.

Your incapacity to forgive yourself. The reason for your Fall.

\- - -

Lying on the floor, hands clenched to my chest, glass sprawled across the tiles, thinking I'm going to die.

What is happening to my heart?

_You go to fast for me, Crowley. _

It hurts. 

Doesn't he know?

I would die for him. I would damn my soul all over again, burn all over again, twist the knife in my back and tear myself apart for him.

I've been waiting so long for something to happen to me, done everything I could for You to smite me.

Look at me now and know there is something wrong with me!

I can barely hold my bones together.

I am only dust and oblivion, and the smell of something burning in the distance still clings to me like death does to mortals.

And my heart – my heart should be empty. G- Something help me.

I want to know the fires his hands bring. I want to know the words to his prayers. I want him to tell me what he knows of redemption.

\- - -

Forgiveness, Starlight, is taking the knife out of your back and not using it to hurt anyone else.

But you keep shoving it back into your own chest.

I wish I could tell you not to touch your body with violence. Not to hate the shell you live in. To treat yourself with the love that I have felt for you since the very beginning. And if not Mine, then Aziraphale's.

Like all those moments where he'll stand before you, holding your face in his hands, encasing it like a crucible, taming the fire that rages in the pit of your mind.

Why do you always feel so terrible when he touches you, when he smiles at you, when he makes all the little gestures that say he loves you?

Yes Starlight: you refuse to see it and he won't tell you, but he loves you. It makes you feel like you've actually done all of the terrible things you imagine.

He forgives you, Starlight. He forgives you.

But you aren't ready to be loved like that.

\- - -

“What does it feel like?”

It was a cosy afternoon in the bookshop. Aziraphale is sitting in his favourite chair, his nose buried in a dusty book. Crowley is sitting at the desk near him, his face buried in his arms in an attempt to nap the time away.

“What does what feel like, my dear?” answered the angel barely raising his eyes from his reading.

The demon placed his chin on the back of his hands.

“Love.”

He said it so quietly that the word almost didn't survive his mouth.

But it was loud enough to make the angel look up, surprised, grief slowly tinging his soft features. He wanted to ask where this question came from, but he knew better. Demons can't feel love. But after so much time spent with Crowley, he knew this wasn't true.

Aziraphale knew the feeling so well. It was what he had been created for. And he had felt it from Crowley in overwhelming waves over time.

But how do you explain love to an entity who cannot remember what it feels like? It's like trying to explain the colour blue to the blind.

How could he tell him? That love is something that creeps in. That love is something that lives in the smallest moments. That love was long nights spent at the Ritz, and walks in the park, and long drives to nowhere.

How could he tell him that mortals had it all wrong? That there is nothing about love that involves a fall. You do not fall in love; you walk into it, step by step. Without realizing it.

How could he explain that he hadn't noticed he loved him until that fateful night of 1943? He had saved his books. Crowley had never cared for literature, but he had saved them. Simply because he knew their destruction would upset the angel.

How could he explain that he had wondered every day after that night how he hadn't noticed how handsome the demon was? That now he couldn't look at his lips without wondering what it would be like to kiss them. That knowing you're in love is the most exquisite torture.

Love, he thought to himself, is never the grand sweeping gestures he has read about so many times. It's quiet and unassuming.

It is Crowley, sitting in his bookshop, asking him a question, and him finding magic in the moment.

That's what he wanted to say.

Instead, he replied: “I'm not quite sure how to explain it, dear boy.”

Crowley gave a small nod.

And that was that.

\- - -

Know that happiness eventually comes.

Hurt passes, despite everything.

Be patient, Starlight.

\- - -

There is the Ritz. There is a celebration. An Apocalypse avoided.

They've toasted to the World and exchanged pleasantries. Now the hour grows late, the birds have gone quiet on Berkeley square. They're quiet as well – enjoying each others company in silence.

Crowley is spread out on his chair in a way physics shouldn't allow, gently swirling the champagne inside his glass. He is aware that Aziraphale is looking at him more intently then usual, but can't muster the venom to tell the Angel to quit it.

What comes next is entirely unexpected.

"If you asked me to run away with you again, my dear" he starts, fumbling with the buttons of his vest, "I wouldn't say no."

Crowley hummed: "But would you say yes?"

Aziraphale put his glass down in favour of the demons hand.

For all of his hesitation of the past 6000 years, there was no doubt left in the angel. "Yes."

"You don't mean that." Crowley answered after a moment, curling back into a sitting position, his gaze falling to the ground.

"Yes. I do," he emphasized delicately, the crease in his brow furrowing, as it did in matters of utter importance. "I love you Crowley. I always have. It just took me a long time to get there."

And there it was.

Aziraphale was sitting so close to the demon that he could feel him shake under the weight of that confession.

Crowley closed his eyes and took a deep breath in a vain attempt to soothe the worry that crunched his eyebrows together.

"Please don't hurt me, Angel" he whispered. "You can't say things like that. I can't take it. I'm not as strong as you think I am. Well, obviously. I can be... But sometimes – I wish I wasn't."

Offering is one thing. Receiving is another. To be loved – to be beautiful in the eyes of another – it starts with being seen. But allowing yourself to be seen also allows for you to be cast down.

He would never, though. His angel.

Aziraphale took his face between his hands, a gesture he had done a million times over, and slowly leaned in to press the softest kiss on his lips.

Crowley had fantasized about this moment so many times. He had imagined Aziraphale's touch would be like worship.

No amount of imagination could have prepared him for this: Aziraphale kissed him, not like a benediction, but like something he needed, as if he too knew what it was like to burn.

**Author's Note:**

> Thank you for reading!


End file.
